Japanese art draws teens into a world of their own

Saturday

Oct 27, 2007 at 4:01 AM

By LINDA HALL

Staff Writer

WOOSTER -- Drawing lessons for anime, a Japanese art form, began at the downtown Wooster library with language study.

Anime Artist Russell Merritt from Newark exchanged words in Japanese with about 20 teenagers assembled with sketch books and a lot of questions in the upper level meeting room of the Liberty Street library.

Japanese isn't the only foreign language Merritt speaks.

"I teach teenagers, so I speak 'My Space' ... and 'Facebook,'" he said. "We'll answer all your questions, I promise," he told the gathering of children representing a wide age range from young adolescent to older teenager.

For the uninitiated, the entire sessions sounded like a foreign language, as Merritt and his audience explored manga comic book-like characters, anime/manga terms and books and drawings in his own collection.

Anime is defined as a colorful, stylized, futuristic form of Japanese animation. Graphic, or comic book-style, novels, may be illustrated with anime.

"He is saying all these words I thought (my children) made up," said Margaret Freed, who brought her three daughters -- Margaret, 15; Catherine, 13; and Juliet, 11 -- to Merritt's presentation.

"I also do traditional Japanese art," Merritt said.

"I've been studying Japanese for six years," he said, distributing copies of the Japanese alphabet to all the class participants.

Merritt teachers technical design, digital design and gaming at Central Ohio Technical College. "I never realized how much work went into game design," he admitted.

Before beginning a series of drawing lessons on a white board, Merritt asked, "How many of you draw your own characters already?"

"Most of you do," he observed from the hands raised.

Demonstrating how anime faces are created, he said, if they can make an "O" and a "V," "half the battle is won."

He showed class members how minor adjustments to the mouth could portray "smiling, laughing, yelling, calling for someone."

"Jas," he addressed a participant named Jasmine, "you have perfect manga hair. You have this wonderful streamer that comes down like this and a sweep of hair that comes down like this."

"You don't just draw lines on the head (as hair)," he cautioned.

The group next worked on drawing bodies of characters, as Merritt encouraged, "It's practice, practice, practice, practice."

As an art teacher herself, mother Margaret Freed appreciated Merritt's discussion of body proportions. "I've been telling them how to draw a head (for instance), but they don't want to hear it from me."

Her understanding of anime and manga is more limited.

"They're really into it," she said. In fact, her oldest daughter is writing her own book as a self-determined 4-H project.

"I'm a traditional artist," Freed said. "(This is) all new to me."

But anime/manga is the one interest all of her daughters share.

Teen Librarian Linda Uhler has been buying books in the genre and scheduling activities associated with it as a way to attract an underserved clientele.